the man takes the broom out to the back porch
sweeps off autumn’s fallen leaves
the cat rubs against the man’s leg
sees the broom
scampers off
the man sweeps
the cat sits in the yard
watches the man
the cat’s tail swishes
this way
that way
fallen leaves rustle
the cat’s tail swishes
this way, that way
rustling fallen leaves
in the yard
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
distant whistle of the midnight freight
pulling into the rail yards downtown
burring rumbled whirr of freeway traffic
passing endlessly behind my house
murmuring voices of next-door neighbors
home from the show and not yet drunk
muffled clink of the spoon against
the bottom of my ice cream bowl
a cough from somewhere outside
a cricket from somewhere inside
the ticking clock on the bookshelf
(Published in High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19); copyright 2012, 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on—his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as to cowhide and to logroll, or such adjectives as no-account and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that “in these five moneths of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic; the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.” – H.L. Mencken, The American Language (emphases and spellings in original)